Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (66 page)

   
What he had to do was break
this guy's habitual cool. To raise the vibration rate until the bass-cello
voice distorted and the lotus position collapsed in a muscular spasm.

   
He'd never seen Andy anything
but laid-back. This, he realized, was the most impenetrable of all screens.
Laid-back people were not evil. Laid-back people were wise. Evil people ranted
like Hitler.

   
They weren't people you'd known
half your life. And they were never called Andy.

   
But then, Powys thought,
watching the figure enter the clearing and move towards the stone, the stench
from a rotten egg was only apparent when the perfectly rounded, smooth, white
shell was cracked.

   
The stone gleamed pearly grey,
collecting what light remained, a ghostly obelisk. Powys watched and tried to
slow his breathing. Not yet time; to get a stake into Dracula, you had to wait
for daylight.

   
Or, in this case, until the
curfew was over. The curfew was central to the Crybbe experience. The curfew was
pivotal. Whatever had been building up - tension, fear, excitement - climaxed
and then died with the curfew.

   
He'd experienced it twice, in
radically different ways. The first night with Rachel, when they'd wound up in
bed at the Cock so fast they hadn't even been aware of the chemical interacting
until the chemicals had fully interacted. And then by the river, when he'd
found the shotgun in his hands and come within a twitch of blowing Jonathon
Preece in half.

   
He lifted the sleeve of his
sweatshirt to expose his watch; it was too dark to be certain, but he was sure
it must be ten o'clock.

   
Ten o'clock and no curfew?

Staggering into the church, Jimmy Preece was faced with its silent,
solitary occupant, a wooden arrow pointing at the altar rails.

   
He stood gasping in the
doorway, and there was Jonathon's smooth, mahogany coffin shining like a taunt,
a pale gleam of polish in the dimness.

   
Mr Preece couldn't find his
breath, his legs felt like wet straw, and the urge to pray had never been as
strong.

   
Please, God, protect us, he
wanted to cry out until the words leapt into every corner of the rafters and
came back at him with the illusion of strength.

   
And illusion was all it would
be. He remembered the trouble there'd been when the old vicar was ill and the
diocese had sent a replacement who'd turned out to be one of these
Charismatics, some new movement in the church, this chap spouting about
something he called Dynamic Prayer, shouting and quivering and making them all
sing like darkies and hug each other.

   
No end of disturbance, until a
phone call to the bishop had got rid of him. Not the border way, they told him.
Not the
Crybbe
way.

   
Oh, Jonathon, Jonathon . . . Mr
Preece felt his chest quake in agony, and he turned away, groping for the
narrow, wooden door to the belfry.

   
The old routine, making his
painful way to the steps. But, for the first time, the routine resisted him and
his foot failed to find the bottom step. Twenty-seven years he'd done it,
without a break, until Jack started to take over, and now Jimmy Preece had come
back and he couldn't find the blessed step.

   
Mr Preece squeezed his eyes
shut, dug his nails into his cheeks, raised his other foot and felt the step's
worn edge slide under his shoe.

   
What time was it? Was he late?

   
His chest pumping weakly like
these old brass fire-bellows his wife still kept, although the leather was
holed and withered. His foot slipped on the edge of the second step.

   
Come on, come on, you hopeless
old bugger.

   
He set off up the narrow stone
steps, some no more than two foot wide.

   
Used to be . . . when he was
ringing the old bell every night . . . that. . . these steps was . . . never a
problem . . .even when he'd been working . . . solid on the lambing or the
haymaking and was . . . bone tired . . . because . . .

   
Mr Preece paused to catch a
breath, six steps up.

   
Because sometimes, in the old
days, he'd just, like, floated to the top, like as if there were hands in the
small of his back rushing him up the steps, and then the same hands would join
his on the rope, because it was meant.

   
But tonight there were
different hands, pressing down from above, pressing into his chest:
go back, you poor, tired old bugger, you
don't wanner do this no more.

   
A son in the hospital. A
grandson in his coffin.

   
What if you dies on the steps?

   
One Preece in the hospital. One
in his coffin. One in a heap on the flagstones. And Warren.
   
Best not to think about Warren.
   
And a silence in the belfry.
   
No!

   
In a rage, Mr Preece snatched
out his dentures, thrust them down into a pocket of his old tweed jacket,
forced some air into his broken bellows of a chest and made it up two more
steps.

   
He'd do it. He'd be late but
he'd do it. Never been so important that he should do it.

   
He saw the light above him and
the ropes. Never more important, now the wall around the Tump had been breached
and something was in the Court.

   
As had been shown by the death
of that woman.
   
But it had never been in the church.
It couldn't get into church.

   
No, it couldn't.

But it wasn't Andy Boulton-Trow, waiting by the stone.
   
It was a woman. Well, a girl.
   
And naked now.

   
She stood with her back to the
stone, as if sculpted from it, her eyes closed and her mouth open, and the
night sang around her.

   
Jesus God
, Powys whispered, the voyeur behind the oak tree, stunned
into immobility.
   
The pupil!

It was one of those nights when the thoughts were so deep you couldn't
remember getting home or putting the car away. Some small thing brought you
back into your body - like the tiny grind of metal in metal as your Yale key
penetrated the front-door lock.

   
Fay could just about read her
watch in what remained of the light and the glow from neighbouring windows; she
couldn't believe how rapidly the days had been shortening since Midsummer Day.

   
Mr Preece was already a couple
of minutes late with the curfew. She imagined him toiling up all those steps to
the belfry, poor old sod.

   
Obsessive behaviour. Did he
really think the family might lose Percy Weale's sixteenth-century bequest if
the curfew remained unrung for a single night because of a dire family crisis?
Had to be more than that. Joe Powys would find out.

   
Oh, God, Powys, where are you?

   
One thing was sure: Jack Preece
wouldn't be ringing the curfew for a long, long time - if ever again.
   
What does it mean, Joe?

   
She ought to have gone with
him, even if this was something crazy between him and Boulton-Trow, something
that went back twelve years or more.

   
It was so easy at night to
believe in the other side of things, that there
was
another side. That Rachel - and Rose - had died because of a
magic with its roots four centuries deep . . . or perhaps deeper, perhaps as
old as the stones.

   
With Arnold tucked, not without
some effort, under her arm, Fay went into the house. It was far too late now to
send the tape for the morning news. The late-duty engineer at Offa's Dyke would
be long gone. She'd have to go into the studio early in the morning again,
having rung Hereford General to find out Jack's condition.

   
She lowered the dog to the
doormat.
   
'I wish I could trust you, Arnold,'
Fay said, not quite knowing what she meant. His tail was well down; he looked
no happier than she was. Jonathon Preece had set out to kill him and had died
in the river. Arnold had lost a leg, so might Jack Preece by now . . .

   
If this was the seventeenth
century she'd have been hanged as a witch, Arnold stoned to death as her
familiar.
   
Stop
it, you stupid bitch.

   
She clenched her fists and felt
her nails piercing the palms of her hands. Everyone around her seemed to be
carrying a burden of possibly misplaced guilt. Powys for Rose and Rachel. Her
dad for Grace and for her mother. She herself. . .

   
Fay went down on her knees in
the hall, the front door open to the street behind her. She buried her head in
Arnold's fur. Arnold who looked no more evil than . . . than Joe Powys. As she
began quietly to sob, all the lights went out in the neighbouring homes.

   
Bloody
electricity company. How
could
this keep happening?
   
Fay choked a sob in bitter anger and
punched at the wall until her knuckles hurt. Oh God, God, God, God, God.
   
She stood up shakily.

   
'Dad?'

   
There was no response.

   
She closed the front door
behind her. He'd either gone to bed or he was still over at Jean Wendle's
having his treatment. Or his end away if he'd got lucky. Fay sniffed and smiled
She'd once asked the local doctor what the Canon's condition meant libido-wise.
'He'll be less inhibited,' the doctor had said, 'By which I mean he'll talk
about it more often.'

   
The Canon wasn't back.

   
But - Arnold whimpering -
somebody was.

   
As Fay stiffened in the
darkness of the hallway, she saw vague yellowish light under the door of the
office.

   
Very slowly the office door
began to open.

   
Fay caught her breath.

   
It did not creak; she only knew
it was opening because the wedge of yellow light was widening, and it was not
the soft and welcoming, mellow yellow of a warm parlour at suppertime.

   
This was the yellow of
congealing fat, the yellow of illness.

   
The hallway was very cold. It
was a cold she remembered.

   
'Grace?' Fay heard herself say
in a voice she didn't recognize, a voice that seemed to come from someone else.

   
She felt her lips stretch tight
with fear. She kicked the office door open.

   
'Did she speak
?' Jean Wendle had asked.
   
'Not
a word'

   
Grace Legge wore a nightdress.
Or a shroud. Was this what shrouds looked like?
   
'And
she didn't move?'
   
'No.'

   
Grace was standing by the
window, very straight, a hand on a hip, half-turned towards Fay. She was haloed
in yellow light. The yellow of diseased flesh. The yellow of embalming fluid.

   
She was hovering six inches off
the floor.
   
'Harmless,
then.'

   
'Grace,' Fay said slowly. 'Go
away, Grace.'

   
But Grace did not go away. She
began to move towards Fay, not walking because her feet were bound in the
shroud, which faded into vapour.

   
Fay backed away into the hall.

   
Dead eyes that were fixed,
burning like small, still lamps. Burning like phosphorous.

   
'She can't talk to you, she can't see you; there's no brain activity
there . . . Blink a couple of times. . , and she'll be gone.'

   
Fay shut her eyes, screwed them
tight. Stood frozen in the doorway with her eyes squeezed tight. Stood praying.
Praying to her father's God for deliverance. Please make it go away, please,
please, please . . .

   
She smelled an intimate smell,
sickly, soiled perfume, and felt cold breath on her face. She opened her eyes
because she was more afraid not to, opened them into a fish-teethed snarl and
yellow orbs alight with malice, and spindly, hooked fingers - the whole thing
swirling and shimmering and coming for her, rancid and vengeful, filling the
room with a rotting, spitting, incandescent yellow haired.